An ongoing review of politics and culture

Like David Frum, I’ve gotten almost a hundred emails on my prior post on Sarah Palin’s experience and its relevance for predicting her potential future performance as president. To reiterate, I addressed only this question, not the broader questions of whether she helps or hurts McCain politically, how she would do as vice president and so on. I made the not-so-crazy-seeming-to-me observation that the experiences that tend to be associated empirically with strong presidential performance are either serving as governor of the largest state or serving as supreme military commander in war.

I’ve made hiring and/or firing decisions for thousands of people for complex, demanding jobs (though none, to put it mildly, as complex or demanding as POTUS). As regular readers of my posts will probably not be surprised to learn, I’ve always put in place detailed systems to track predictions for future employee performance made at the time of hiring vs. actual subsequent performance over a period of years. I have developed the very unromantic view that prior relevant performance is the best single predictor of future performance. Of course, when hiring someone into a new job, the trick is defining “relevant”. It seems to me that running the largest state or the armed forces in war are the closest available analogies to being president. This is why my empirical result didn’t surprise me a whole lot.

Consider the list of 20th century presidents with one of these two qualifications (WSJ 2005 rank in parentheses): Theodore Roosevelt (5), Franklin Roosevelt (3), Eisenhower (8), Reagan (6).

Lots and lots of things matter beyond objectively-measurable experience, and there are many circumstances in which people with such qualifications are not available (e.g., the Governor of California is not eligible, and there have been no recent major wars), but for conservatives to argue that Sarah Palin has the experience that indicates she is likely to be successful as the President of the United States is a suspension of critical faculties.

Further, while personal judgments about candidates are also useful in predicting performance, any empirical analysis of hiring practices that I have ever done indicates that there are some important caveats to using judgment in this way: (1) it should be exercised in the context of intensive interactions of varied types that are validated as predicting performance, (2) these interactions should be well-structured to maximize comparability across candidates, and (3) while some people can be shown empirically to be better at making such judgments than others, the idea of “a nose for talent” that trumps all other predictors is always a self-serving delusion. I have seen no good evidence that the McCain campaign has pursued such a process, and I refuse to believe that I can read some press reports about her, see her give a good press conference, and have some mystical ability to have anything other than a wild guess about Sarah Palin would perform as president.

Of course, just as I ended my prior post, I’ll note that none of McCain, Obama and Biden have these specific executive qualifications either, and in fact have exactly the kind of legislative-dominated experiences that have tended to be associated with our worst-performing presidents.

? Maybe you are just getting at the largest state thing instead of “executive experience”, but Nixon was Vice-President. Clinton was Governor of a state with more people than Alaska. So was Carter. So was Wilson and Coolidge. HW Bush ran the CIA. Which bucket did these people go into during the previous analysis?

I think the dummy variable for “executive experience” is what is troublesome about the analysis (but you aren’t trying to publish this); I’d also be curious as to a seperate variable for military experience, as former generals are usually thought of as ho-hum president (Eisenhower’s high ranking is odd).

There’s a near outlier in your list of president’s without big-time executive experience, but his actual experience came about in a manner I imagine thus:

~One day long about the beginning of the last century, a yeoman ploughman looked up from his labors behind the mule he worked on his mama’s farm. “Just about done”, he thought. Finishing the last furrow, he headed back to the yard. After checking on his mother, still weak from her recent operation, he thought he’d read the paper while sitting in the front seat of his well-maintained 1911 Stafford. On page three he noticed that some foreign prince had been killed in some damn-fool terrorist conspiracy. “Glad it doesn’t affect me,” …

And of course, he ended up being a captain of artillery in the war that the terrorist triggered. Commanding less than 1000 men proved to be enough executive experience. He credited the successful leadership of the battery with all that came afterwards.
As vice-president, he replaced a man with rather more experience in foreign affairs and a founder of a corporation still going today. But then qualifications only matter when predicting future performance and Henry Wallace, the man he replaced, had proven unqualified.
Even small scale successful executive cannot be gainsaid; not dispositive, but worthy of consideration.

I can think of no good reason why being governor of the largest state is that much different from being governor of a smaller state. The nature of the job is the same. The decisions and management necessary are very similar.

In short, I suspect this is a largely arbitrary criterion which you’ve used because it happens to yield a strong dichotomy.

“I can think of no good reason why being governor of the largest state is that much different from being governor of a smaller state. The nature of the job is the same. The decisions and management necessary are very similar.”

Size does matter here, with the issue being that small polities work much more via. direct personal connections than big polities, just like small firms work much more via the boss dealing with all employees than large firms, where decisions have to be delegated. The question with Palin is if her management approach to running the state of Alaska and interacting with the public and interest groups in Alaska scales up to the US? Scaling isn’t trivial in organizations: you can supervise 10 employees directly, but 100 employees you cannot supervise directly. Delegating supervision and accountability is a very non-trivial task and it is unclear how much a bit more of a year of doing so in a small state (where the capital has total population of 31,000) scales to doing so in Washington, DC.

You commented on NPR today that Sarah Palin is pro-gay. This woman is anything but pro-gay. She may have vetoed legislation that would have prevented benefits for same sex employees’ partners, but she did so only because her AG told her the legislation was unconstitutional. She is open to an amendment that would prevent benefits for same sex partners.

Do you think the religious right would be so for her if she was pro-gay. You sounded like a log cabin republican.

I get this issue, and in my first post on this, I qualified the heck out of these observations.

I think the easiest case, byt the way, is VP. My take is that this is almost totally unlike being POTUS. It’s not even really executive experience. I agree that small state / big state isn’t nearly as clear-cut. I think that (as per Stephan) size matters. Also, the largest state will tend to be more competitive for the job and also tends to be highly dynamic, and in most of history, involves all kinds of challenges (immigaration, rapid technological flux, etc.) that, while not unique to the biggest state, will most significant there.

Cleanthes:

Check. Truman is the highest-ranked 20th century president without this executive experience (though it is interesting that he ranks lower than TR, FDR, and (slightly) Reagan, and only (slightly) higher than Eisenhower). Of course, as per my first post, if we go back further in history, we can find the truly towering exeception to all of this – Lincoln. As I said in this post, however, which deck would you want to draw from?

Gabriel:

This was not done consciously, but I worry a lot about doing it unconsciously. Given that I know about how high each POTUS ranks, it is a very strong hypotheses that I did something like this without trying. This is one reason that I qualified it so strongly, and why it is so important to sanity-check this against other experience and common sense. Even with that, as I said in the first post, I would only characterize this fidning as interesting, and not dispositive. On the other hand, if one rejects this analysis, I think that he must either (1) say that experience can not be used to provide any usefel inforamtion to even partially predict performance in this context, or (2) present an alternative scheme. Given the number of data points and the complexity of the predictive problem, I strongly sustpect any alternative scheme would have the same qualifiers.

Just curious why you limited your lists to 20th century presidents, which leaves out THE big argument for good presidents without executive experience, i.e. Lincoln. (It also leaves out another argument in favor of executive experience, Washington.)

“Scaling isn’t trivial in organizations: you can supervise 10 employees directly, but 100 employees you cannot supervise directly. Delegating supervision and accountability is a very non-trivial task and it is unclear how much a bit more of a year of doing so in a small state”

I believe the average state has something along the lines of 90,000 employees, which would suggest perhaps 10,000 employees for small states like North Dakota or Alaska, depending on the propensity toward public consumption in the state in question and the division of labor between state and local government. I am working from memory here, but if I recall correctly, Alaska is abnormal in the degree to which its public spending is concentrated in state (as opposed to local) agencies.

The boss cannot supervise 10,000 employees directly: there have to be several layers of intermediaries. Also, the variegation in the functions performed by those 10,000 is similar to that of the 300,000+ employees of New York State’s government.

It may be that scaling is correllated with the appearance of challenging social problems or with the multiplication of interest groups with obstructive vetoes, but that is a different argument.

One quibble about “executive experience”: Theodore Roosevelt was elected to a single two-year term as governor of New York in 1898 directly after his triumphant return from the Spanish-American War and became the vice presidential candidate in 1900 not on the basis of his achievements in state government but mostly because the Republican political machine wanted to shove him out of Albany.

Another part of why being the governor of Alaska isn’t particularly convincing on the national level, is that Sarah Palin has never had to deal with anything remotely resembling a financial dilemma. Her entire stay in Juneau has been during a time of massive growth in oil revenues, which represent somewhere around 85% of the state’s total revenue. As a result, the government is drowning in cash despite the fact that there’s no sales tax, no income tax, no corporate taxes. That’s a situation entirely divorced from the financial realities facing the other 49 states and the national government.

In fact, Alaska is so flush with cash right now that Palin has decided to send out $1,200 checks to every citizen of the state, ostensibly to offset increased energy prices. (This is separate from the permanent fund dividend. This is a check directly from the state surplus.) While few will quibble with the idea of giving back from a massive surplus, the fact is, that “solution” to the energy crisis doesn’t scale and is utterly meaningless to the rest of America. There’s no other governmental entity that can afford to cut thousand-dollar checks to every one of its residents.